Prophet Song - Paul Lynch
- Publisher – Oneworld
- Published – Out Now
- Price – £9.99 paperback | £5.99 Kindle
Every year I try to read the Booker longlist, and every year I find it's a roughly even split between books that I adore and books that I simply can't get through. I haven't managed to read all of 2023's longlist, and now that this year's list has been announced last year's is no longer a priority for me, but that roughly even split remains true - I loved The Bee Sting, Western Lane, and In Ascension, didn't particularly care for How To Build A Boat, and couldn't finish All The Little Bird-Hearts or The House of Doors. Despite my feelings about the rest of the list, though, I usually enjoy the winner a lot.
Enter Paul Lynch's Prophet Song. Here's the synopsis:
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, Larry, a trade unionist.
Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and when her husband disappears, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a society that is quickly unravelling. Soon, she must decide just how far she is willing to go to keep her family safe.
Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Paul Lynch's Booker Prize-winning novel is a devastating vision of a country falling apart and a moving portrait of the resilience of the human spirit when faced with the darkest of times.
I won't bury the lede: this one was a miss for me. If I hadn't felt some obligation to finish it I would have abandoned it somewhere around the 40% mark.
Initially I really liked it. In the opening chapters I felt that the writing was strong, that the decision to eschew paragraphs lent an urgency to the prose that reflected the subject matter, and I was compelled by Eilish's worries about her misssing husband. But it wore off fast, and after the first couple of chapters I found myself zoning out and becoming distracted while reading it. Each time I reached a section break I would put the book down to do something else and not return to it for a while, finding that I could only manage to read it in 20 minute chunks. The book is only a little over 300 pages long and yet it's taken me four days to get through it, having stopped to read Headshot and Sift in the meantime. That's unusual for me.
Part of the reason I kept putting it down is that it's simply exhausting to read. Lynch's writing is strong, yes, but there's absolutely no variety in it. Sentences ramble and diverge with no change in pacing except that sometimes they become longer. The whole book is stuck in the same rhythm with nothing to break it up, so that it quickly becomes tedious.
I also found that my tolerance for Eilish as a main character lessened as the book went on. There are very few points where she actually takes action. Everything happens around her or to her, and even when other people try to convince her to act she resists. She definitely feels like a real person stuck in a position where she doesn't know what to do and is afraid to dramatically change her life even when the life she knew has already disappeared - she's realistic, and on that level the book succeeds, but it doesn't make for particularly compelling fiction. The most powerful moment comes late in the novel, when she actually attempts to find out what's happened to one of her sons and ends up in a military hospital. That section is a real gut-punch, and it's the one part of the book that I found I couldn't put down, but it comes far too late.
Prophet Song really wants to be an important book, and obviously the Booker judges believe it to be, but I'm not sure I agree. Lynch aims to show us what drives a person to leave their home, give all of their money to people traffickers, and pile onto an inflatable dinghy with their infant child to cross the sea to England in the dead of night. The problem is that the people who are likely to read a book like this are the people who are the least in need of convincing about this issue, and once you realise where the book is headed and have identified the message it contains it becomes clear that it's not doing very much else. And at that point it becomes hard to want to keep reading.
Prophet Song is not a bad book, but it was probably my biggest disappointment of the year.
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